Radhika Jones Introduces Vanity Fair’s 2018 New Establishment List

Michael B. Jordan and Radhika Jones at Louse Point beach, in East Hampton, New York.

Photograph by Christopher Legaspi.

Since the last time this magazine published its annual New Establishment list, the Establishment has taken a number of well-deserved knocks. Down the titans fell—a bunch of them, anyway—from Hollywood to Palo Alto to Washington, and so the New Establishment of 2018 is newer than ever. “Disruption” has been the irritating buzzword of our era since the tech boom began, but it’s arguably in the past 12 months that this ethos started to democratize itself and become a true cultural force, one that delivered returns. Once upon a time, the disruptors tended to be the people in charge; now they can also be the women who fight harassment, or underserved audiences who turn out to see Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians, or political candidates who answer to their constituents over their party and their party’s donors.

A list like the New Establishment offers a snapshot of a moment, with signs of things to come. Not every face is new, of course, but even the familiar ones are up to fresh tricks—buying, selling, podcasting, uprooting to the West Coast, making content deals with a former president, getting tweeted at angrily by the current one. In these pages you’ll find the architects of mergers and deals that will shape what we watch and how we watch it; the new C.E.O.’s brought in to detox corporate cultures; the political newcomers who, win or lose in November, have already shifted the way we talk about issues like gun control, reproductive rights, and progressivism in general. The big tech companies still bestride the narrow world like lumbering Colossuses, but even they have been called to account for the role they’ve played, whether wittingly or (worse?) unwittingly, in the unraveling of democratic institutions, the undermining of a free and accountable press, and the tainting of codes of civility and decency. And the work of the taciturn G-man in our No.1 spot remains the wildest card in Establishment politics. Not to add to the burden on his shoulders, but he could end up seriously disrupting the 2019 list.

I am always curious to know what notable people’s parents think of what their children do for a living, so it makes me happy that Joe Hagan logged some quality time with Michael B. Jordan’s mother and father while reporting his cover story on the Black Panther star. You get a sense of how the two of them see him—their handsome young man who’s making good on his upbringing—while the rest of us see a screen idol in the new Hollywood mold, from his prestige roles (in The Wire, Fruitvale Station, and Creed, to name a few) to his plans to produce. Neither view is incorrect, though on a sunny day in the Hamptons in August he was just a guy looking extremely cool riding a bike no-handed down a quiet lane, casually repelling sand flies with nothing more than his charisma. I didn’t anticipate that the day would end with my walking into the bay to join him for a photo, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Jordan’s world now is one of possibility, and how exciting for all of us to be along for the ride.